ings

ings is a guitarist, maker, songwriter, and video director who lives and works in Seattle, WA. She is a community facilitator, and organizes many DIY shows and festivals in the Seattle area.

Her new album, Lullaby Rock, will be self-released on November 15th.

Lullaby Rock began to manifest itself as soon as ings moved to Seattle. Upon arrival, she began studying guitar and composition with Luke Bergman (Bill Frisell, Heatwarmer), and writing songs inspired by artists like Bjork, Ben Folds, and Blake Mills. Their musicianship and dynamic range provoked her to write and arrange the songs on this album with a nuanced use of volume and tone. She began calling her genre “lullaby rock,” for which the album was eventually named: an embracing of both the distorted and the hushed, the painful and the joyful, and balancing these, the honest introspection that can lead to real healing.

ings professes a deep belief that music functions as software for the brain: “A song can have the power to elevate your mood, or depress you terribly. Lullaby Rock is intended to be musical software to facilitate healthy states of acceptance, processing, and striving.” As the album – recorded and performed by ings along with friends in her new home – approached completion, ings brought the recordings to Melanie Dettmer (Earth, Femi Kuti, Sunn o))), Boris) and the two of them mixed Lullaby Rock at Dettmer’s studio.

Each song on the album is some form of advice from ings to ings, and each began as a repeated phrase she would sing aloud to herself in order to carry on through a difficult situation. They contain a set of tools, useful for a full menu of emotional states:

“If Not You” (and its video, directed and edited by ings herself) is about how ”you have to be yourself, even when it’s emotionally inconvenient. No matter how far away you wander, you must always come home.”

She describes “Amelia” as “a platonic love song for a friend, because friends deserve more love songs, don’t you think?” 

“Anyway I Go” is “for when you feel like a failure. For me, it catalyzes that moment where you get fed up with being stuck, and realize that ANY decision is better than staying put. Move in any direction, and you will find the grit to face your current circumstance.” 

And “Pick Yourself Up” is a song for emotional emergencies — the fire extinguisher behind the glass. “It’s a reminder that you either create your own value in the world, or suffer whilst accepting anyone and everyone else’s valuation.”

In short, Lullaby Rock is a compilation of hard-won advice. It’s permission to write a love letter to yourself or to a friend. A practice in compassion. A reminder that you’re more than what you do or make, a reminder to keep trying, to do your best, and to forgive yourself for not knowing yet.

MORE ABOUT INGS
Ingrid “Inge” (rhymes with “wing-y”) Chiles was born in her house in Missouri, the youngest of seven children. She was unschooled, and spent most of her time reading in her treehouse — her family didn’t own a television, or toys with batteries. She left Missouri at seventeen for a secluded mountain village in Washington state. She attended a small high school there, dressed up as Ziggy Stardust a lot, and performed “Space Oddity” in a red spandex jumpsuit at graduation.

She went back to Missouri for college, and arbitrarily decided to study chemistry. She spent a lot of time playing guitar in her room. She wrote a lot of songs. She recruited a random assortment of people who had never been in bands, and they figured out how to play the parts. And then they played shows.

She was not doing her homework.

She left college and used tuition money to buy a used Blues Jr. from Guitar Center. She decided to create a persona named ‘ing,’ and then added an ‘s’.

In March 2014, she woke up one night, and the ceiling of her small 1-bedroom house was on fire. Her dad had reminded her to replace the batteries in her smoke alarm just three weeks before.

The intensity of that experience catalyzed her move to Seattle. She had been drawn to Seattle’s music scene for years, from the experimental community around Table & Chairs Records, to the freedom and joy of local DIY artists like Heatwarmer, Karl Blau, iji, and LAKE. Upon arriving in Seattle, she moved into a show house, and began co-organizing lots of shows.

Inge has been awarded a LISTEN UP! Women in Music Composers’ Grant, commissioned by Hugo House Literary Series, and is an artist-in-residence at the Jack Straw Cultural Center. She has been commissioned several times to write love songs for specific couples, and she will write one for you. She’s played many DIY shows on the West Coast, and opened for Mirah on her Understanding tour.